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Teacher finds gun in 14-year-old student’s bag after deadly Philippine school shootings
Cebu Police Provincial Office said the firearm reportedly belonged to the student’s grandfather, which he took from inside a cabinet at their home
- PUBLISHED: Fri 21 Aug 2026, 3:57 PM
An alert teacher found a gun inside a student’s bag in the central Philippine province of Cebu on Thursday following a deadly school shooting that killed two in Zamboanga City on Tuesday.
The teacher at Lut-od National High School in Pinamungajan, Cebu, implemented a random inspection of schoolbags and found a revolver inside one.
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According to the Cebu Police Provincial Office, the bag was owned by a 14-year-old student, but the powerful .357 magnum revolver did not contain ammunition.
“The firearm was subsequently secured for proper documentation and disposition,” Cebu Police Provincial director Colonel Abubakar Mangelen said in a statement.
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The police further disclosed that the firearm reportedly belonged to the student’s grandfather, which he took from a cabinet at their home.
The child is currently under the care of the Pinamungajan Municipal Social Welfare and Development Office.
“We commend the school personnel for immediately reporting the discovery and seeking police assistance. Their prompt action helped ensure that the situation was contained before it could potentially lead to harm,” Mangelen told reporters.
It is not yet known if the teenager was influenced by the two deadly school shootings on Tuesday that killed two students in Zamboanga City and the first shooting in Tacloban City last June, where three students were killed.
Prankster arrested
Meanwhile, in Bantayan town of the same province, police arrested a 21-year-old man for threatening to carry out a similar shooting at the town’s Senior High School. The person reportedly made the threats online and in person, telling an individual to warn the school guard about his plan.
He reportedly told the other individual to refrain from going to school on Friday morning if he wished to be spared from the planned attack.
The police tracked down and arrested the threatener, who now faces potential charges for grave threats and violations of the Philippines’ Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012.
What is happening to the children?
Reports of the gun discovery earned various reactions and comments from Filipino netizens, mostly wondering why Philippine schools are becoming violent and deadly.
Ramil, a father of two, recalled that when they were students, they were asked to bring machetes to school to help out in the maintenance of the school grounds. “We did not go around hacking each other,” he said.
Another parent, Rosemarie Ledesma, called for stricter disciplinary policies for today’s schoolchildren to prevent them from being entitled on one hand and overly sensitive on the other.
Up until the 1990s, corporal punishment, such as hitting and pinching children, was an acceptable norm in Philippine culture. The Philippine Department of Education, however, formally banned corporal punishment in schools in 2012 in a directive called the Child Protection Policy.
Child care experts, however, warn against knee-jerk reactions to the spate of school violence in some Philippine schools. Child welfare and psychosocial interventions professor Mae Fae Templa said violence outside school gates must be looked into.
Templa added that the Philippine government has failed to curb loose firearms among Filipino gunowners. An estimated 3.9 million firearms circulate in the Philippines—roughly one million licensed while an undetermined number are unregistered.
The Zamboanga shooter accessed firearms owned by his father—a customs official subsequently suspended—while the Tacloban shooters likewise accessed weapons from relatives in law enforcement and private security.